An Update on Standards

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While a lot of attention goes into the CPUs that form the heart of our PCs, some of the biggest changes to the computers we use have much more to do with other standards – the things that let our machines connect to peripherals and be manageable, etc.

Making all of this happen is typically the province of groups of vendors, typically working through a trade association or a committee of a scientific or technical organization. Recently, I’ve met with a number of representatives of these groups, and the changes they have planned are quite impressive. USB 3.0 (Superspeed), Wireless USB, PCIe 3.0, DMTF and SATA 6Gb/s all offer the potential to change the PC platform. But some will appeal to just about all of us, while others will likely end up mostly important behind the scenes.

Take USB 3.0, which the USB Implementer’s Forum would have you call “superspeed USB.” The committee has been talking about a long time and some companies are not happy with the delays.(See PC Magazine’s take on “Where’s Superspeed USB 3.0?“)

But despite all this, this is the standard most likely to affect just about every computer user. It wasn’t too long ago that all of us were complaining about the silly naming between USB 1.1 (called full-speed) and USB 2.0 (called high speed). Today, everything is USB 2.0 and it’s really how we connect devices to our computers. USB 3.0 will offer two way connections at 4.7 Gbps, a big improvement from today’s USB 2.0, which offers 480 Mbps. (Yes, 480 million bits per second now seems slow; remember when a 56K modem seemed fast….)

The USB Implementers forum, which is creating the specification, points out that USB 3.0 will not only offer more performance, but also power efficiency, because it has no device polling and thus lower idle power requirements. Backers say you should be able to copy a 25GB HD movie in 70 seconds, provided of course, the USB device itself supports that kind of speed. In any case, the idea is to make USB much less of a bottleneck for connecting flash drives, external SSDs, and other devices that use fast memory, such as cameras or portable media players.

Another technology I continue to be very excited about is Wireless USB, promoted by the USB Implementers Forum.

The idea is pretty simple: instead of using cords to connect devices, you’ll connect them over a short distance using a standard called ultrawideband. (To some extent, you can do this today using Bluetooth, but whereas Bluetooth has mostly been successful in mobile phones, this is building more on the PC infrastructure).

In particular, I’m looking forward to being able to have my notebook connect with a wireless USB hub, so that I could theoretically just put my notebook next to my display, keyboard, mouse and local print, and use them all wirelessly, without a physical dock. One reason I like this is that most docks are designed for a particular type of notebook; this would be a standard they all could use.

Version 1.0 of this spec is completed, and there are a few products that support it out now. While this is taking longer than I would have liked (supporters have been talking about this since 2004; and I saw some interesting demos at CES this year), a couple of companies now have shipping silicon, and there I expect to see a lot more products starting in early 2009. Also next year should see a 1.1 version of the specification.

Another important update coming is to the PCI Express, promoted by the PCI-SIG. This is the bus that high-end I/O internal peripherals use to connect to PCs, most notably for graphics cards in desktops, and for communications cards in servers. Currently, most PCs are just now moving to PCIe 2.0, which supports links of 4 Gbps (which means up to 8 GBps in a 16 lane link). PCI-SIG is now working on PCI Express 3.0, which is designed to allow connections that are twice as fast, up to 16 GBps.

The committee hopes to have this validated as a standard in the next year or so, so final products probably wouldn’t appear until 2010.

And the list goes on. The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) is pushing SATA 6Gb/s, with the plan to double hard drive transfer speeds. SATA is the current hard drive interface in nearly all desktop and mobile PCs (having largely displays the older PATA drives). The committee is hoping to have the specification finished by the end of this year, with first silicon in the middle of next year and products in 2010.

Sometimes the specifications get almost no publicity, but turn out to be very important behind the scenes. Consider DMTF, which has been around for dozens of years, first as the Desktop Management Task Force and now as the Distributed Management Task Force. Most large IT departments use products that depend on the old DMTF standards for managing physical hardware; now DMTF is now working on managing “virtual machines” – coming up with a standard for a virtual device that can be deployed on technology from all of the major virtualization players, from VMware to Xen to Microsoft.

These standards tend not to get the kind of attention we pay to new CPUs or new graphics cards. But in terms of making our computing experience faster, better, and more reliable, they play a crucial role.

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